General project status

Jikes RVM is currently the most popular platform for virtual machine research. This popularity is reflected in the particpation on the mailing lists where most questions can be answered.

Memory management research is a particular strength of the Jikes RVM. The Memory Management Toolkit (MMtk) provides a well-rounded selection of garbage collectors and the compiler replay feature enables researchers to control mutator variation. The MMTk test harness can be used to test collectors.

In contrast to this, the compilers are currently a weak spot in the Jikes RVM. For example, the Static Single Assignment (SSA) form in the compilers is currently disabled because of bugs.

The Jikes RVM is not state-of-the-art in some areas. In particular, Jikes RVM currently does not provide 64-bit Intel Support. Another big limitation is the lack of support for the OpenJDK class library. The project has received community contributions to improve those shortcomings but the code is not yet in the mainline. The Jikes RVM would also profit from efforts directed to stability improvements and bugfixes. For example, Jikes RVM currently cannot run all of the Dacapo 9.12 benchmarks.

The Jikes RVM team aims to provide at least one release every year.

Note: The information on this page refers to the status in the code repository and not to the status in the current release.

Note: If you want to help, please see How to Help or inquire via the mailing lists.

Near-term goals

Add support for the OpenJDK class libraries

Add Intel 64-bit support

Preliminary long-term goals (still need further discussion)

Improve stability

Improve compliance with JVM spec

Write unit tests for all classes

Improve and extend test suites

Add support for relevant new platforms (ARM?)

Merge relevant changes from MRP

Detailed project status

This section provides more detailed project status information for the components. If you think an important point is missing here, please contact us via the mailing lists.

Notable omissions in the collector choices include Baker-style collectors, the Compressor and on-the-fly collectors. Note: There is an implementation of the Sapphire garbage collector for Jikes RVM but as far as we know there's currently nobody working on getting the code into the mainline.